Naming the Secret Agent: Law, Suspicion, and Moral Autopsy After Communism

ABSTRACT Situated in the long aftermath of the fall of state socialism in Poland, which was marked by suspicions of treason or collaboration with communist secret services, this article offers an ethnographic study of a trial of a historian accused of being a communist spy. It develops the notion of moral autopsy to articulate how a person comes under a judicialized and moralized examination by transitional justice processes like lustration, which produces a world of secrecy and suspicion while claiming to create transparency, especially when it is dominated by right‐wing populist politics. Through close analysis of evidentiary procedure, courtroom performances, and testimonies, this article offers a critique of this moral autopsy mode and highlights the potential of ethnography to attend to emergent, alternative forms of truth, justice, and community unfolding within the legal process.